The Man Who Walked Into His Own Execution - April 3, 1895

On April 3rd, 1895, Oscar Wild the most celebrated wit in Victorian England entered London’s Old Bailey courthouse to prosecute the man who had publicly called him a sodomite. Every friend he had told him to run. He stayed. What followed was the systematic destruction of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest literary minds, carried out by a society drowning in its own moral hypocrisy. But the complete story is more complicated than the martyr narrative allows and its echoes in the present moment are impossible to ignore.